Content warning: discussion of suicide.
A cultural context where "rich man" doesn't mean "bad man"
In the Lotus Sutra the Buddha tells an allegory about a rich man, his sons, and their manor.
"At that time a fire suddenly broke out on all sides, spreading through the rooms of the house. The sons of the rich man, ten, twenty, perhaps thirty, were inside the house. When the rich man saw the huge flames leaping up on every side, he was greatly alarmed and fearful and thought to himself, I can escape to safety through the flaming gate, but my sons are inside the burning house enjoying themselves and playing games, unaware, unknowing, without alarm or fear. The fire is closing in on them, suffering and pain threaten them, yet their minds have no sense of loathing or peril and they do not think of trying to escape!"
To convince his sons to leave through the small, flaming, gate he offered them a bribe. Knowing that the only thing his boys liked more than games and toys was going out for a drive, he offered each of his sons either a goat cart, a deer cart, or an ox cart if they were to leave the house. His kids got their shit together and ended up escaping to safety. The rich man, wanting to make good on his promise and also wanting to provide something dope af for his kids, decided to get each and every one of them an ox cart with the highest quality animals he could find, plenty of leg room inside the cart, and exteriors decorated with jewels (though a sick decal would be more appreciated in modern times). All of the sons are happy with their gift.
The Buddha explains that he is the rich man, humanity is his children, the house is the world, and the fire is the suffering and evils inherent to life. We live our lives doing our best to distract ourselves from the heat of the flames, but the Buddha knows that while it might be difficult to get out, it is possible to escape and receive the grandest possible ox cart (conceptualized in the text as each individual achieving Buddhahood).
However, some of his followers have some questions. Did the Buddha basically just lie to his kids? There were a whole bunch of them who were expecting deer carts but he ended up giving them something they didn't expect. Gautama defends himself in two main ways:
1) He loves his sons so much that he would do anything to make sure they escape the fire.
2) Each son got something even better than they were promised and none of them were upset by the change.
He calls this "expedient means." Basically, in order to get each boy out of the house he had to promise something specific that would appeal to them. Had he not offered some of his sons a goat cart they may have not left their play space. However, the rich man knowns his sons much better than they know themselves; while the fanciest possible ox cart might have not lured them out it definitely made them more satisfied in the end.
It is finally explained that the different initial carts are metaphors for different groups of people. "Leaving home" by being bribed by the goat cart is like being a Theravada Buddhist, the deer cart is one who manages to "leave home" with no prescribed methodology (people like Gautama Buddha himself, who ended up inventing his own school of thought), and the ox cart is Mahayana Buddhists who are being offered the thing closest to the rich man's actual reward (note that this sutra is a Mahayana text).
Meeting Jeanne D'Arc
Forget the Buddha for a second and think about me instead.
I was raised as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; I was raised Mormon. The Book of Mormon contains this passage, speaking about itself:
"Behold, I would exhort you that when ye shall read these things, if it be wisdom in God that ye should read them, that ye would remember how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down until the time that ye shall receive these things, and ponder it in your hearts.
And when ye shall receive these things, I would exhort you that ye would ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ, if these things are not true; and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost."
My interpretation of this as a kid was: after you read the Book of Mormon you can pray about it with the correct attitude and you will have a transcendent spiritual experience confirming the truth of the book. I was so confident that this was going to happen to me that when I read the Book of Mormon for the first time as an eleven-year-old I was absolutely shocked that I didn't receive any form of revelation. I assumed that I was doing something wrong.
I assumed that I was doing something wrong for eight years. I read and I prayed over and over again over that time period and I never once felt anything outside of myself. It started to, over time, get harder and harder to read the book or engage in church because the pain and shame of not being able to connect to God was overwhelming me. I stopped sleeping and I started to have to deal with physical sickness originating from my emotions. My health got so bad that when I turned nineteen and applied to go on a mission for the church, something that I saw as my last chance to make the divine connection, I was turned down.
I realized that I was going to kill myself if I continued on this quest. The pain was just too intense. I sat in my room, made one last prayer to please receive a manifestation of truth, or even comfort. I received nothing and I made a choice: I would stop pursuing a connection to God in any literal sense. If God existed it was my only way to honor Him; I presumed he didn't want me to end my own life.
In a way, though, my prayer for comfort (and eventually manifestation of truth) was answered. I had discovered the works of psychologist C.G. Jung during this time. After classes at Utah Valley University I would go to their library and read the books they had on him. I purchased books for myself and I studied those, and what I couldn't afford I read summaries and analysis online. His ideas fascinated me, especially his taxonomy of the Self.
Jung's idea is as follows: we are multitudinous. We all have an Ego, the "I" that we embody in our consciousness in the day-to-day. We have a Shadow, the rejected and shameful aspects of ourselves; the Shadow acts autonomously and unconsciously. We have a Pneuma, a spirit which normally connects a man to his feminine side (Anima) or vice versa for women (Animus). We have a Persona, the toolset and masks we wear to interact with the world. We are all connected to the Collective Unconscious, a set of psychic structures all humans share due to our similar brain structures. We are also connected to the physical world around us, the universe itself. Finally, at the biggest level we have the Self. The Self is the unified whole of every aspect of ourselves. A holistic everything. This concept of the Self is connected to other spiritual concepts like Oneness, Logos, Cosmic Truth, and most importantly in this context, God.
Jung's ideas were a major healing point for me. My suicidal thoughts subsided and I started to feel like a real person who could pursue his own life in a way I never did before. I made a major life choice to take a break from school: I took a job working for Salt Lake City Public Services where I still work today. I made important friend and colleague connections, worked for the best youth center in the state, and met my fiancée. I began to study, take healthy risks, explore my psyche, and engage with life. It felt really good.
One of the first points of study was a renewed interest in reading, as started with reading Jung's books and essays. The toxicity around my relationship with the Book of Mormon had poisoned my relationship with other books as well (when I was younger I loved to read), but once I had made my choice to leave the church my love of books was rekindled. One of the first books I picked up was Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc by Mark Twain.
Here's what you need to know about the book and its author:
1) Twain did painstaking research to tell the life story of Jeanne (Joan's real, French, name).
2) Jeanne was a French girl who helped her kingdom defeat the English in the Hundred Year's War. She claimed that an angel had given her revelation, managed to convince the power structures of France to support her, and her work, in many ways, turned the tides of the war.
3) The English ended up capturing her and killing her, she died a martyr.
4) Twain tells this story 100% straight, he shows her talking to an angel as an actual being.
5) Twain is one of America's most famous atheists.
This set of facts confused me. Twain was consistently annoyed by Christians, he used Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn to mock them in their stories. Why didn't he roll his eyes at the superstitious beliefs of these people who gave an army to a farm girl? The book had absolute respect for Jeanne, her beliefs, her mission, and her connection to the Divine. I pondered on the truths of these things:
I was struck.
I suddenly felt a feeling I had never had before. I knew in an instant that it was the connection to the Holy Spirit I had wanted to feel my whole life. I connected to Jeanne from out of time and I felt her devotion. I connected to Twain as he studied her life and came to respect her. I connected to every religious person who had experienced the divine in the past and I finally understood. I felt like my whole Self and an experience of truth came to me: every religion and every spiritual practice is a language designed to help us speak the words of and manage to get to this feeling. None of them are "true" because "truth" doesn't matter in this space, I was feeling something beyond and it was full of trust and love. This was, in many ways, the most important day of my life.
The experience ended.
Call to Adventure
"Expedient means" is a utilitarian argument coming directly from the Self. We, as Ego beings, are trapped in the consciousness of "I"; we do not have a holistic view of our purpose and mission nor the dangers of the Shadow and our other psychodynamics. The only way for the Self to convince us to escape is to offer us something that the Ego wants and can easily understand. I can easily imagine a deer cart, but a giant ox cart with the coolest and bestest oxen and air conditioning and super comfy seats and lots of shiny gems is honestly a little overwhelming.
There are two modifications I would like to make to the Buddha's parable.
1) How many carts?
There is a little bit of debate around whether or not the parable is describing three carts or four carts. In the three carts argument the Mahayanists would say that the ox cart they are being offered by the Buddha is the same cart everyone gets in the end of the story. From this perspective they are essentially saying, "Our religion is the true religion, but that's okay because everyone else will come to see the truth in the end and we'll all be happy." In the four carts argument some Mahayanists would say they were being offered the thing closest to the S-tier ox cart everyone gets in the end, but even their conceptualization of the divine reward isn't quite right.
In order for the parable to really work I think the fancy smancy ox cart concept needs some altering. Right now the narrative is a bit self serving to Mahayanists and doesn't quite capture . The "expedient means" argument only works for me if the real cart is so big and so grand that it would be blow our minds at how cool it was, but we couldn't believe it until we saw it. Right now, with the Mahayanists being offered an ox cart and the Buddha giving us a better ox cart doesn't capture that and it implies that Mahayana Buddhism is the "best" cart in some way.
a) I don't want to dismiss the idea that some religious practices or languages can be better at helping us "escape" over others. Mahayana Buddhism is awesome, I have practiced its subschool of Zen Buddhism and I have benefitted greatly. However there are a lot of assholes who think their religion is the best religion and I don't trust anyone who makes claims such as these. My position is there are "best religions for a particular individual to practice" as a cart-bribe over others.
b) To take away the Mahayana bias and to complete the metaphor I think the final cart has to be something beyond the imagination and/or something that the rich man's sons couldn't believe was waiting for them. The True Cart cart should be pulled by griffins, should be Ra's sun barge, should be non-Euclidean, should be connected to 7G internet, etc.
2) I want to expand the concept a little bit:
Each cart is representative of a religion or spiritual practice. The Buddha explains that there are three, but I would like to argue that there are thousands, maybe tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even one specific cart for every individual who has ever lived. My divine connections have shown me that the religious experiences of mankind are all different carts; I would reckon that most who would even engage in such a metaphor (read: religious people who don't decree that their religion to be the "only true" religion) would want to consider their divine language to be a cart.
Divine language acts as a cart in that it acts as a Call to Adventure. I, a kid growing up in Utah, was told that there is a God and a dude named Joseph Smith who told us the Right Things to know about God. This goaded me to "leave my games" and try to get out of the house, it caused my first steps towards the gate. Whether we conceptualize this cart as "Mormonism" as a whole or "Scott's personal experience with Mormonism" it doesn't really matter; I will always be grateful for it causing those first steps.
Over those seven years, however, the cart stopped appealing to me. I started to only see the problems, with the cart and with myself, and my progress halted. If the rich man had only given us one option, the Mormon Cart (the animal is probably a curelom) I'd never have a chance of escaping. Thank God, and I mean that literally, there are other carts. Twain and Jung helped show me the cart of spiritually minded agnosticism and of mystic psychology (animals: cat cart and snake cart). Discovering these two helped me find other carts like Hinduism, Stoicism, and once I realized that I didn't have to have "one true" cart I finally found an appealing version of the Christian cart (monkey cart, lion cart, donkey cart, respectively).
This conceptualization of spirituality is one that can help us all escape the fires more effectively. You've got the cart you want, I have the cart I want, there are amazing things about your cart you can tell me about and there are amazing things about my cart I can tell you about. This dynamic makes "escaping" even more appealing and gives us more tools to make it. We have not escaped the flames yet, but I can and will support you as we venture. I know that the carts I'm rushing towards aren't the ones I'm going to get, but I cannot wait to see what I have waiting for me.
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